A scholarly study of China’s pandemic response shows how trying to control information is the worst thing to do in a crisis.
An examination of how a culture that emphasizes stability was ill-prepared for massive disruption.
The global responses to the Covid-19 pandemic will be debated for many years, but this book provides a granular account of how it started. Yang, a senior political scientist and China specialist at the University of Chicago and author of a number of academic books about China, delves deeply into the first months, drawing on the records of the time and his own contacts. He notes that the Chinese government is usually seen as a dictatorial monolith, but in practice, this is not really true. Overlaps and gaps of authority are common at the local level, and framing it all is an obsession with stability. Consequently, when reports of an unusual illness connected to the Huanan Seafood Market began to appear, people were reluctant to sound the alarm. Even when information eventually filtered up to the higher levels of the health authorities, little happened, aside from official censorship. At some point, the infection numbers could no longer be ignored, and when Beijing swung into action, it moved fast, sending medical resources to the affected area and imposing a severe lockdown on Wuhan. The delays and obfuscation led to enormous damage. “No amount of investment, state-of-the-art equipment, or talent can make a difference if the public is kept uninformed and those with knowledge are not allowed to speak up or, if they do, are ignored, or even punished,” concludes Yang. Despite this essential lesson, much of the text will be a difficult read for general readers, with many detours and huge amounts of detail. The author’s careful analysis will be most useful for health professionals and policymakers.
A scholarly study of China’s pandemic response shows how trying to control information is the worst thing to do in a crisis.Pub Date: March 1, 2024
ISBN: 9780197756263
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2023
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
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